possible reconciliation. Religion
was the privilege of the pulpit....

It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was
ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the
discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and apologetic
part in public affairs. And this was done not out of contempt but
respect. The hold of the old religious organisations upon men's respect
was still enormous, so enormous that there seemed to be a quality of
irreverence in applying religion to the developments of every day. This
strange suspension of religion lasted over into the beginnings of the
new age. It was the clear vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any
other contemporary influence which brought it back into the texture
of human life. He saw religion without hallucinations, without
superstitious reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and
air, as land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the
Republic. He saw that indeed it had already percolated away from the
temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought to imprison
it, that it was already at work anonymously and obscurely in the
universal acceptance of the greater state. He gave it clearer
expression, rephrased it to the lights and perspectives of the new
dawn....

But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of the
times it becomes evident as one reads them in their chronological order,
so far as that is now ascertainable, that as one comes to the latter
nineteenth and the earlier twentieth century the writers are much
more acutely aware of secular change than their predecessors were. The
earlier novelists tried to show 'life as it is,' the latter showed
life as it changes. More and more of their characters are engaged in
adaptation to change or suffering from the effects of world changes. And
as we come up to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the
everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is continually
more manifest. Barnet's book, which has served us so well, is frankly a
picture of the world coming about like a ship that sails into the wind.
Our later novelists give a vast gallery of individual conflicts in which
old habits and customs, limited ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and
innate obsessions are pitted against this great opening out of life that
has happened to us. They tell us of the feelings of old people who have
been wrenched away from